genehack.org

presented without further comment…

Your Aspie score: 139 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 68 of 200

you can of course take it yourself.

This morning, I had the single best shaving experience of my life (get yer head out the gutter, youse…) thanks to the HeadBlade. Highly, highly recommended if you aspire to the cueball set.

TheWife’s sister was in town for a very brief visit this weekend. The four girls spent Saturday at the zoo, enjoying the lovely brink-of-fall weather, while I did some spray-painting and a purge’n're-arrange grind on my office, followed by a sort’n'purge in the garage. That latter bit culminated in a “free junque” mail to the neighborhood list; a version minus the stuff already taken is going out on the internal “discussion” list at work today. A trunk load of stuff was dropped off for donation Sunday afternoon; another trunk load will go out some time this week or next weekend at the latest. My office is still a bit of a disaster area, with tons of piles here and there waiting to be sorted through — but there’s a plan as to where everything goes, and I think the end result is going to be more open space and a more productive environment — more mentally “quiet”, lots less stuff clamoring to be looked at. Pictures once I get done, again hopefully by next weekend.

In more “meta” level news, TheOlderChild seems to be settling into and enjoying school. I need to come up with a way to discuss some of that stuff in a more anonymous environment, but in general things are going as well or better than expected. TheYoungerChild started crawling about three weeks ago and is currently trying extremely hard to walk — she pulls up without difficulty, and stands easily as long as she keeps one hand on something. However, she’s not quite up to no-hands standing yet, and she’s got a little scrape over one eye to prove it. It looks like she spent her weekend brawling. (”The first rule of Walk Club is don’t talk about Walk Club.”)

Personal meta: I sent in my PPW registration this morning; that thing is coming up fast. Holla back if you’re going to be there.

Speaking of coming up fast, it’s time to start herding kids towards the car to get them to school…

Mailing List Management Software

I needed to set up some mailing list management software recently. I considered Mailman. JWZ’s Mailman Considered Harmful walked me back away from that and got me pointed towards SmartList. While trying to find out if anybody other than JWZ was actually using SmartList, I ran across an advogato diary from 2003 which got me pointed to Minimalist. Happiness ensued.

A couple other mail-related links

I set up the mailing list software on a new VPS I have at Slicehost (who I highly recommend, by the way). I don’t really have anything terribly important migrated over to that server yet; part of the mixed joy and curse of a VPS is that you end up doing a lot of stuff that gets taken care of for you in a shared hosting environment, and doing that stuff properly takes time. Mail for some of my domains is routing through there now, however, which means that spam is getting routed there too. I was having a fairly bad time of it until I added Postgrey to the mix. At that point the amount of spam making it into inboxes slowed to a trickle — most days, I get none at all and usually what little makes it past Postgrey is flagged by SpamAssassin.

I also wanted some visual check on what the mail server was doing, so I installed Mailgraph. I had to tweak the code a bit to get it to look like I wanted, but eventually I ended up with some nice graphs.

Early Saturday morning, I got up bright and early and went out for a short bike ride. I had a pretty tight timetable, as I had to be home in time for TheWife to get to a cooking thing she was going to. I figured how much time I had (about two hours) and set my cell phone alarm to go off at somewhat less than half that (45 minutes). Since I had considered grabbing a mini frame pump on the way out the door but decided against it, I of course flatted. It was also, predictably, about 5 minutes before my alarm would have told me to turn around, about 6 miles in to the ride. So I walked back to the car, all 6 miles, in cycling shoes. As of Monday morning, the weird popping noise in my ankles had stopped.

Later on Saturday, while buying some wine and beer at the excellent and highly recommended Chevy Chase Wine and Beverage, I spotted Erik Dellums, probably better known to most of you as “that guy that played Luther Mahoney on Homicide”. He was buying a case of Macallan (or they had re-used a Macallan box to hold what bottles he had purchased).

Sunday I mostly loafed around the house and listened to my ankles make funny popping noises. Occasionally, I would walk up a flight of stairs and then cry for a little bit.

Today, after work, I went for a 25 mile ride with 3 other much more experienced cyclists, which was appropriately humbling. I did make it back alive, however. The bike shop called today to let me know my new bike is ready, so sometime tomorrow I will head over there and pick it up. I also need pedals, shoes, a helmet, some socks, and at least one set of shorts with some padding in them, because my ass is starting to hate me very very much.

How are you?

You suck:

I love that after being sent to the wrong place, it sits around for 12 hours, even though it only takes 1 hour for it to get back to the right place.

My whole damn day has been like this today, I swear. So much for a relaxing day off…

Actually, it’s been ten weeks, but who’s counting?

Anyway, TheBaby had her two month checkup this morning. Everything is fine; at 11 pounds she’s 50th percentile for weight, 15 3/4 inches on the head is 80th percentile, and at 24 inches she’s 95th (!) percentile for length.

At some point, we’ll, you know, take some more pictures of the kid or something…

If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. Just because, here’s some snaps of me and TheBaby made with PhotoBooth:

A cropped version of my bulbous head taken from the third shot is my new chat icon — which reminds me, thanks to the new laptop, I’m on a different network at work and actually have access to chat, which is useful. If I know you and we’re not already in each others IM clients, drop a line — I’m on AIM or Jabber, take your pick.

Oh, yeah, I shaved my head last weekend; that’s what the Locks of Love link was about. Just for the record, I did it a week before that other person did; it’s not my fault she’s got to be biting on my styles…

In the usual place, over at Flickr.

Monday

We got up at around our normal “go to work” time and, after grabbing showers, finalized the packing. Our babysitter (one of TheChild’s teachers) arrived around 7:30; shortly after that, we got TheChild up and moving. After a quick call to the hospital to verify that we were still on for 9am, TheWife, TheSisterInLaw, and I headed out.

We got to the hospital just about exactly on time — so, of course, we had to sit around and wait for about 30 minutes before they got us into a room. Once we got into the delivery room, more waiting ensued. Fortunately, we were prepared, with reading materials, DVDs and a laptop, and snacks-a-plenty.

With the birth of TheChild, there were some complications that were possibly due to TheWife being under-medicated (she’s strep positive and didn’t get the full antibiotic course before TheChild decided to pop out). To avoid that this time around, the first antibiotic dose was hung well before any attempts at inducing labor. This meant that things felt like they were moving pretty slowly for most of the day — which was frustrating but necessary.

The first antibiotic dose was hung around 10am, and then the oxytocin drip was started around 11am. Some time in there, Medley and NowThis arrived on the scene. The whole morning and early afternoon is somewhat of a blur, because not too much was happening. Medley and I walked to a nearby Panera to fetch lunch, and NowThis drove us back before returning to work. Before and after there was just a lot of sitting around, reading, fetching ice chips for TheWife, and helping her up to go to the bathroom.

By the middle of the afternoon, things were progressing more. TheWife’s water was broken around 3pm, which got things moving at a faster pace. An hour or two later, she was 5cm dilated. She’d felt the need to urinate for some time but wasn’t able to because of the position of the baby relative to her bladder. Finally, in order to get some relief, she asked for a catheter. Once that was placed, she voided about 400mLs and felt a lot better — and only minutes after that, she was at 8cm and wanting to push. Things chugged right along at that point, and TheBaby popped out at 7:42pm.

Unlike TheChild’s birth, the immediate postpartum scene was fairly calm. The baby was placed on TheWife’s stomach, and everybody relaxed and waited for the cord to stop pulsing. Once that happened, I cut the cord, we did the weight and measurements thing — 7lb, 11oz; 21 inches — and the placenta was delivered. NowThis returned to pick up Medley, and they gave TheSisterInLaw a ride back to our place so that she could relieve the babysitter. They left around 8:30pm.

At that point, TheWife and I were back into a waiting phase — TheWife was working on getting TheBaby to nurse, and we were waiting to be moved into a recovery room. Eventually, TheBaby and I went over to the nursery for various treatments and more measuring. We hung out there for a goodly time, and then we were finally reunited with TheWife around 11pm. I sat with them for a bit, then headed for home, grabbing some fast food on the way.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning TheSisterInLaw, TheChild, and I got up and headed over to the hospital. Visiting hours didn’t start until 11am, but we were there a few minutes early. TheChild got to meet her baby sister, which she was quite excited about. After hanging out for a while, the three of us went to get some lunch, and then I dropped TheSisterInLaw and TheChild back off at home and returned to the hospital.

Earlier in the morning, we had discussed going home. TheWife was ready to go, and not looking forward to another night in the hospital. She’d asked her nurse about leaving, and by the time I returned, that process had already started. We got various instructions from various people, and finally got mustered out of the hospital around 6pm.

Various Stats

Total time in the hospital for TheWife: about 33 hours.
Total time for TheBaby: about 22 hours.

APGAR scores: 9 and 9

Weight at birth: 7lb, 11 oz.
Weight 3 hours postpartum: 7lb, 9oz.
Weight 2 days postpartum: 6lb, 15oz.
Weight 3 days postpartum: 7lb, 1 oz.

Relative weights and measures, 2 days post-partum:
50th percentile length
25th percentile weight
75th percentile head circumference